Somewhere in the halls of Sahuarita Middle School walks a boy who already is a deadbeat debtor.

He isn’t old enough to qualify for credit. But at the house his family was evicted from recently, someone used his name and Social Security number to rack up a $950 unpaid bill with Tucson Electric Power.

The boy’s mother – a financially troubled woman with a string of criminal convictions – says she doesn’t know how the bill ended up in her son’s name.

Experts say it sounds like a case of perhaps the most insidious form of identity theft, in which parents with bad credit hijack their offspring’s personal data to obtain credit cards, loans or utility service.

Such crimes, which appear to be on the rise in Tucson, are seldom reported to law enforcement.